A 27-year-old Bronx woman is dead after an unlicensed doctor injected her with an anti-aging serum at a holistic wellness center — and the same government that hounds law-abiding citizens over permit technicalities couldn't be bothered to stop a known medical impostor from opening shop in plain sight.
Elizabeth Baron fell unconscious around noon on Sunday after Luis Rojas Cabrera, 55, administered an IV infusion of NAD+ — a trendy nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide treatment pitched for energy, cognitive clarity, and anti-aging — inside the Bereshit Lifestyle Center on Riverdale Avenue near West 232nd Street, according to police and prosecutors. She went into cardiac arrest and was rushed to NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital, where she was pronounced dead around 1:10 p.m.
Rojas Cabrera was arrested hours later and charged with reckless endangerment and unauthorized practice of a profession. He is licensed to practice medicine in the Dominican Republic but holds no license in the United States, Assistant District Attorney Ethan Reisbaum told the courtroom during his arraignment Monday night. Administering NAD+ intravenously requires a prescription from a medical professional — a requirement Rojas Cabrera had zero authority to fulfill.
Here is the part the regulatory class doesn't want to dwell on: this wasn't his first brush with the law. Rojas Cabrera was arrested at Newark Airport on November 6, 2025, carrying a metal baton in his luggage while returning from the Dominican Republic. Days later, he was arrested again at the same airport, again returning from the Dominican Republic, this time with nearly 200 files of prescription medications, over 30 tablets, and 10 syringes of lidocaine. Two airport arrests for smuggling medical supplies into the country, and no agency flagged him. No license was revoked — because there was none to revoke. No inspector shut down his practice. He simply carried on, injecting patients in the Bronx until one of them died.
AM New York reported the death as a "botched procedure" and withheld the victim's identity pending family notification. The New York Post identified Baron by name and detailed the prior arrests and the specific IV treatment involved — facts AM New York omitted entirely.
The Bereshit Lifestyle Center markets "natural medicine" and therapies aimed at "making healthy living easy," according to its website. The city medical examiner's office is running a toxicology report, and the results could determine whether the charges escalate, sources said.
Baron lived less than two miles from the clinic at the Skyview On The Hudson condo complex. A neighbor, Paula Schaap, described her as a "beautiful young woman" who went to the gym regularly and seemed healthy. "She always looked beautiful, but I had no impression of somebody who was overly concerned about that," Schaap told the Post. "It looked more like she was professionally made up for a job."
A man with no American medical license, two prior arrests for importing medical contraband, and a business operating under the banner of "holistic wellness" was free to push IV serums into a 27-year-old woman's bloodstream. The state of New York, which regulates everything from your soda size to your speech, couldn't manage the one thing it actually exists to do: protect a citizen from a predator operating in the open.
The toxicology report will tell us what killed Elizabeth Baron. The harder question is who let the man holding the syringe stay in business.
